Various mechanisms exist for recovering a platform from a bad boot. Often re-booting the platform is the first method attempted by the platform for recovery. Boot sector viruses attempt to infect the boot sector of the firmware, resulting in the operating system (OS) not being able to launch properly. Malicious, as well as inadvertent, actions may prevent the OS from loading properly. If the boot sector has been damaged, either by accident, or by malicious code, human operator intervention is often required to boot the platform. Some systems without directly connected media will boot from a remote boot device. The boot vector, or pointer to the remote location, resides in non-volatile memory within the boot sector. If a system is without media, then the pointer to the remote boot device typically cannot be altered without removing the boot sector firmware and either rewriting or replacing it. If the boot vector is tampered with, then the platform cannot boot properly.